Comedy of Terrors

Today's adventure was an arduous hike and some lousy turns down the front of the local closed-for-the-season ski hill. My partner was Vermonster Iain Massucci. He's a young, strong telemarker who busted at least as much trail as I did. Three feet of sugar at the top tapering to three inches at the bottom. All we needed was one inch since it was so dense that you didn't sink more than an inch or you had a problem. The turns were poor but the hike was hard in a good way. The lesson of the day, however, is to budget for a pair of skins. The one hundred or so other slope tool users almost exclusively skinned past us often lapping us as we trudged upward. My thinking had always been that skins are useless in a chute but they do make the approach faster than any other method. Get some skin!